librarian over with a six-string? And then you set a jealousy trap and just like
that, boom, you’re back in Pac Pal with Love?”
His theory is a scratch on the record and he is wrong. I don’t want Love. I
want you. And this is why I’m in the cage, to learn, to face the reality that I’ve
been fighting, that I do feel guilty about shifting gears, not missing my son as
much as I once did, accepting our fate to be apart. You see it in memes all the
time. Life is change. But change is hard. Look at RIP Melanda’s blood letter. She
couldn’t do it. She couldn’t come to terms with the person she was, the person
she wanted to be. But I can. Oliver tunes my guitar and sneers—Your D string is
about to pop, Goldberg—and I won’t pop. I study my enemy; his T-shirt is old, not
vintage. He didn’t drop four hundred bucks for it in some Hulkshit man-
boutique in Venice. He grew up in that shirt. There are pit stains. Grease stains.
The logo is BAXTER’S BOATHOUSE and that’s probably some waterfront dump in
Florida and I shrug. “I don’t really have a plan, honestly.”
“Well,” he says, really going for that aspiring sociopath—psychopath?—vibe.
“If you ask me, my friend, your MILF’s not worth it. Too much baggage. And
Love’s not really the jealousy-trap type. You would have been better off with
your first plan, which I can only assume was to win her back with your music.”
You are not a MILF. You are a fox. And I am not Phil. “What’s Baxter’s?”
Oliver looks down at his shirt as if he forgot that he was wearing it and he’s
insecure. That’s good news for me and he pulls at the hem. “Well, actually,” he
says. “I used to work at this place in high school, the first family that ever owned
me, pre-Quinns. Seems you and I have that in common.”
“The Quinns don’t own me.”
“You keep telling yourself that, my friend. See the key to life is knowing that
you are owned and maximizing the potential of said ownership. I wrote a pilot
about Baxter’s. Shitty script, but it got me my first agent because the bones were
there.”
I think of RIP Melanda’s bones, the animals that might be finding her at this
moment and oh God, Oliver is a writer. I play along. I tell him what he wants to
hear, that I never thought about it that way, that I worked at a bookstore in
high school, that the owner did kind of own me. He nods, pleased, because
writers don’t want to write. They just want to be right about every stupid
fucking thing in the world. “Well, yes, my friend. Oh also… cute cats you got.
Three of ’em. Quite a statement.”
They’re kittens, asshole, and I hang my head in fake shame. Writers are